"The "DRM stuff" amounts to being able to play blu-ray and hd-dvd legally. I really hope they don't remove that capability.

i hope they do
the movie-industry would have to choose between giving up on drm or loosing 95% of the pc-market "

The DRM is not going away, in Windows 7 aka 'Vista Me Edition' or any Windows edition.

With the current Economic outlook Corporations are not going to migrate to Windows 7, or even Windows Vista Business. With Companies barely holding on cutting jobs/cost all over the place. Microsoft has put itself into a 'quandary' of being expensive, hard to maintain and licensing costs to bankrupt any small operation. I think the dot-com-blowout from 2001 is coming again in the a Tsunami wave, it will take out small Tech companies and downsize some MEGA-Corps like Microsoft because the money is not there to buy it.

I believe a lot of companies will be cutting IT budgets and software not really needed to be upgraded quite frankly will NOT be and the MONEY needed to upgrade to Windows vista or Windows 7 is not going to happen. This is a marketing plan to try to lure people into the MS non-stop license payment plan. It would be different IF Microsoft did not have insecure software by design. Windows requires a Anti-Virus client, REAL Firewall, and some type of desktop central management in a Company environment. The ROI is not there to constantly upgrade, spend tons of money on re-writing in house applications, and tons of money on new hardware.

In perfect economic times I am sure it would not be an issue, and it would be good for the economy with all of the new products being sold. However, this is not going to get better tomorrow or next year.

The next Computing man-made disaster will be energy consumption, with the 'self made oil fiasco' the computing sector will be under the gun. With Obama's COAL TAX it will bring very high energy bills and it will crash out the electronics sector the same way they did it with the Auto sector. With Obama quotes of people should not be able to turn the thermostat down to 74 degrees is a fire across the bow shot.

The entire server/desktop methodology will be under fire, and when the Coal Tax powerplant electricity prices go into affect you will see what happens to new hardware purchases and how it will tank the industry.

This is coming and the warning shot since people voted for a guy who says to run the country off of a windmill, walk to work and eat by candle light it will be an interesting to see how the United States is turned into the United Socialist States of America.

I think the USSR was a fine example of how Obama plans to help out people who want something for nothing and the ridiculous Global Warming Swindle that is a FARCE.

Big Government will save you with lots of taxes for working people and freebies for people who cry because they don't have what someone else has because they do no work and will not work...

Man centos_user, you don't make any sense.
1. Suggesting that coal power is good is absurd. So you say that consuming a limited resource, releasing greenhouse gasses, and causing acid rain is somehow good?
2. Alternatives to coal power are not really that expensive. Nuclear and hydropower are almost the same price and are much better for the environment. Even those hyped-up "green" sources of energy that those Greenpeace lobbyists are pushing are coming down in price.
3. In the grand scale of things, computers use very little power. In cold places (like Canada), one can even argue that computers are 100% efficient because the power that computers use is simply turned into heat, reducing our heating bills.
4. When did Obama tell you to "run the country off of a windmill, walk to work and eat by candle light"?

And then you go on to claim that Obama's a communist. Come on, how absurd can you get? You think that pure capitalism will solve our problems? Well how did we get into the hole we're in right now? How did the "laissez-faire" strategy work in the Depression?

Please stop trolling centos_user and only say something if you know what you're talking about.

And then you go on to claim that Obama's a communist. Come on, how absurd can you get? You think that pure capitalism will solve our problems? Well how did we get into the hole we're in right now? How did the "laissez-faire" strategy work in the Depression?

Haha, before I'd take anybody seriously who claims Obama is a communist, I'd suggest Barack take his head out of Wall Street's ass first. This guy is a first class kleptocrat, just look at the appointments for economic affairs, Summers, Geithner, folks like that. Kleptocrats pur sang.

In Europe he would be seen as center-man who listens to everybody, including the green party.

Regarding your opposition to a CO2 - tax:

With oil and coal production nearing its peak, we are facing steep price increases for those resources. With accelerating climate change we are facing more storms, more floods and longer dry-periods.

We now have two choices: Start a changing process early, use the CO2 tax to finance the industry change and profit later from not having to sell everything, including the kitchen sink, to Saudi-Arabia.
Or go on like before, and take a rather hard wake-up when the time to pay is coming.

Please get some facts. One of them is, that humankind will SOMEday have to live without coal or oil. Nobody can say NOW when this will be (it is likely a few hundred or thousand years away), but we better try to shift those times as far away as possible.
The second fact is, that 50 to 100 years from now we will produce 60 - 80% of our electricity from solar power. Because with Chinese and maybe African peoples also coming closer to US and European standard of living we will have no other choice. We will of course still have coal, gas and oil power plants, but they will be backup machines for long winter nights and cold periods.
Whoever is technology leader on solar power plant production will profit the most. Currently Germany has the best financial environment for building solar power plants, which is the reason why more than 50% of current solar panel production world wide ends up in Germany (they have only 100 million inhabitants). When an American company invented a printing process for solar cells, guess what happened? That company built a production facility in Germany. Germany gained jobs which could have stayed in USA. And the solar industry is growing FAST, with the fastest growth still to come.

And regarding your scepticism towards climate change:

1) The climate IS changing. There are just SOME people who want us to believe that humankind has no influence in this climate change.
You will find NO climatologist who says that the climate is NOT changing.

2) All mathematical climate models I know of are "wrong". "Wrong" in the meaning of inaccurate, because not all influences are included or fully understood.
Each of the models was tried out in two ways: Once with human-made greenhouse gases included, once without including them. ALL of those models got by far better accuracy with human influence included. Not a single model was able to simulate the currently happening climate changes without the human-made greenhouse gases.
Is that proof? No. Not in the sense like 1+2=2+1 is provable. It is a strong indication of what is most likely the case.

You could jump onto the freeway directly in front of a truck approaching with 105 km/h. Most likely you will end up dead, but alas, as long as you don't actually jump you have no prove that you will be dead.

I am in favour of trying to avoid that jump, even if it costs us some effort. Compared to what costs we have now from the deregulation of the markets during the last 10 years, the costs of getting the solar, wind, wave and water power train running on its own steam are peanuts. Unluckily the times when we have to pay both of them coincide, and that is the REAL difficulty.
I can only congratulate the US population to have voted for a pragmatist and communicative president who seems to have the ability to get most people to pull into one direction.